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Introduction and challenges

FP&A is a key role of the finance department to improve the enterprise’s economic performance. It manages the entire forecasting management cycle (budget, forecast) and examines strategic decision-making portfolios.

It is a “business partner” function in the sense that it interacts strongly with business departments. Its knowledge of the business and value creation levers should feed into the management dialogue and enable the identification of operational action plans to improve performance.

Efficient FP&A is essential to secure and improve margins, accelerate cash flow, execute the strategic plan and identify new value creation levers.

However, in many companies, the role of FP&A covers tasks far removed from their core missions: too much reporting, not enough analysis, more support than leadership, too much accounting, etc. The challenge of the CFO is to reposition the role of FP&A to add value by transforming this function.

How we can help

Argon & Co consultants draw on their expertise as FP&A managers and their experience overseeing FP&A transformation projects to support the CFO in transforming the FP&A function. They support the CFO during the phases of diagnosis, construction of the vision for the function, identification of improvement levers and their implementation.

Developing a clear and factual diagnosis of the FP&A function:

  • Change the perception of business departments towards Financial Planning & Analysis 
  • Map the current FP&A tasks by area of intervention and assess respective weights in terms of workload 
  • Benchmark the function and evaluate its practices (e.g. organisation, processes, tools) against a best practice framework
  • Share findings and validate the impact of function transformation

Defining the target and the levers to be implemented:  

  • Define the target objectives of FP&A and align stakeholders around this vision
  • Refocus FP&A on its new roles
  • Define the required skills and conduct a “talent review” to build the appropriate skills development plan  
  • Simplify, standardise and automate reporting processes (SaaS cloud solutions for modelling, business intelligence, machine learning, artificial intelligence)